State mechanic’s lien statutes usually invalidate lien filings that have exaggerated or overstated amounts. The language of these statutes varies, but it is implicit that there must be some wrong-doing on the part of the lien claimant. Some statutes expressly require fraudulent intent. That is the case with the Illinois statute.
An Illinois appellate court was faced with the question of whether a contractor’s duplicate billings were evidence of a fraudulent lien filing. In this case, they were. These were not mere misstatements of charges for work. They included billing for materials furnished to a separate project and for labor at two separate projects for the same employees during the exact same hours.
The second case in this issue involves an employee’s right to sue an employer for underpayment of wages mandated by a state prevailing wage statute. If testing and inspection services qualified as maintenance—and they did—was there standing for former employees as third-party beneficiaries of the contracts between their employer and the public works owners?
